Disney+ Head Honcho Talks First Week Glitches, Strategy To Fix

Disney+ put in a lot of effort promoting and marketing their new streaming service. With all the hubbub surrounding the launch, everything seemed to be ready to go by November 12. However, that wasn’t the case and subscribers were faced with several issues accessing the service on the first day. Now, the Disney+ head honcho is addressing the first week glitches and the company's strategy to fix it.

According to Disney+ boss Kevin Mayer, who’s in charge of Disney’s Direct to Consumer and International divisions, the system was overloaded with far more than it could handle and that’s why so many subscribers were met with difficulties accessing content.

We never had demand like we saw that day. . . . We ran into issues with the architecture, and we’re fixing that.

The demand was estimated to be 10 million subscribers within the first few hours of the launch which was “a lot larger than we thought,” said Kevin Mayer while attending a Recode conference in Los Angeles. Though it does seem odd that the company wasn't better prepared to handle the onslaught of subscribers on day one, at least they have a plan to keep things running smoothy now. Here's what Disney+ is doing to solve the problem, according to Mayer.

It was a coding issue and we are going to recode it [with] software updates [in the next week or so].

While the initial glitches were resolved and subscribers were able to more easily access Disney+ series and films, Kevin Mayer didn’t ease audience concerns about their private information being hacked. It was only after the conference that the company released a statement (via Deadline) to make it clear that subscribers’ information was safe and that there had been no security breach.

We have found no evidence of a security breach. Billions of usernames and passwords leaked from previous breaches at other companies, pre-dating the launch of Disney+, are being sold on the web. We continuously audit our security systems and when we find an attempted suspicious login we proactively lock the associated user account and direct the user to select a new password. We have seen a very small percentage of users in this situation and encourage any users who are having these kind of issues to reach out to our customer support so we can help them.

That's good to know. A leak of personal information certainly could have had more disastrous consequences for subscribers than simply not being able to access content.